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The Dawn of Man
- An untamed savannah. Ape-like creatures engage in a constant struggle with hunger, predators, and competing tribes. One morning, they awaken to find that something is different. A large black monolith sits where nothing stood before. The eerie choral music of Gyorgy Ligeti suggests that this object is both powerful and alien. After having touched the monolith, one of the apes suddenly gets an idea while sifting through some old bones. With weapons in hand, things aren't going to be the same for these creatures ever again.
- Discovery on Tycho
- The parting shot of a triumphantly tossed bone cuts to a glimpse of an orbital space station. Humans are finally making their way to the stars, one baby step at a time. The celebratory music of Johann Strauss II accompanies a starliner as it waltzes with a rotating space station to dock. Upon reaching the station, Dr. Heywood Floyd (William Sylvester) addresses a team of scientists, applauding their role in such a major discovery while reminding them of the necessity of security measures. What they've found in the lunar crater Tycho appears to have been "deliberately buried." Dr. Floyd takes a team out to investigate, and the music of Ligeti resumes. This time, the monolith emits a signal.
- Jupiter Mission
- The pensive and lonely music of Aram Khachaturian introduces the first manned trip to Jupiter. Drs. Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea) and Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) have been placed in command of...actually, that's not quite true. The real entity in charge is a machine named HAL (voiced by Douglas Rain). HAL's unblinking red eye monitors all ship activities, but the computer is never too busy to play an odd game of chess with Frank or to conduct psychological profiles of the crew. The secretive nature of this mission, however, seems to have HAL worried. That is, if it is possible for HAL to worry. A reported antenna failure sends Frank outside, where he is killed under some very suspicious circumstances. Finally, Dave's excursion out of the ship reveals HAL's true colors. Humanity has managed to create a machine that is apathetic enough to kill its crew and yet genuinely afraid of death. Dave eventually manages to shut HAL down, only to reveal the hidden reason this mission is so important.
- Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite
- As the sole survivor of the Jupiter mission, Dave must now explore where those radio signals from Tycho were sent. He approaches a monolith in orbit around Jupiter, and, for lack of a better description, he is transported. The solar system fades away as Dave's capsule careens through a phantasmagoric and kaliedoscopic journey through space. On the other side, Dave finds himself landed in a palatial home. Time isn't quite right anymore. He sees himself as an old man, who in turn sees himself on his death bed. Dave's iconic final transformation seems like more of a beginning than an end as Richard Strauss' Thus Spoke Zarathustra announces another triumph for civilization.
- Epilogue?
- Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is, simply put, one of the greatest, most influential, and most ambitious films ever made, sci-fi or otherwise. The first 25 minutes are dialogue free, and the rest of the film isn't exactly teeming with discussion. The amazing special effects, supervised by Douglas Trumbull (the man responsible for the effects in Silent Running and Blade Runner, among other films), haven't lost any of their impact or novelty in the 40+ years since the film was released. The film's soundtrack may very well be the most effective example of incorporating familiar classical music into revolutionary new visual contexts. Sure, people who have read Arthur C. Clarke's other work may wonder why he didn't have more confidence in evolution as a natural process, but I suppose that's where the fiction enters in. Combine all of these elements, and you get a visual and auditory journey to places that humans may never visit, but that they will always dream about.
- Written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke.
